LCIL Friday Lecture 'International Law's Objects'

Dr Jessie Hohmann took up a lectureship with Queen Mary in September 2012, after completing a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge.

Dr Hohmann has broad research interests in the fields of human rights, international law, indigenous rights, theories of human rights and international law, and the role of human rights in social struggles.

Her research has explored these issues through the lens of social and economic rights, with a particular focus on the right to housing. Her monograph The Right to Housing: Law, Concepts, Possibilities explores these areas, and was shortlisted for the SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2013. The right to housing remains a strong focus for Dr Hohmann's future research.

Dr Hohmann’s current research aims to explore the impacts of human rights on the broader field of general public international law, with specific reference to the ‘historical turn’ in critical international law. She is also pursuing projects on the material and visual culture of international law. In addition, her research on the right to housing, and on economic, social and cultural rights more generally, continues to inform and motivate her work.

Her current teaching at Queen Mary is in public law at the undergraduate level, and she offers courses on indigenous peoples and the law at LLM level. She has previously held teaching appointments at the University of Cambridge, King’s College, London and Macquarie University in Sydney. Dr Hohmann is a member of the Human Rights Collegium at Queen Mary, where among other roles she is deputy editor of the Queen Mary Human Rights Law Review. She is also a member of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context (CLSGC). As a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, she is a fully qualified barrister and solicitor in Ontario. In addition, Dr Hohmann has held visiting fellowships at Osgoode Hall (York University) and at the University of Sydney.

Lecture summary: The legitimacy and authority of international law have traditionally been considered in terms of its normative and regulatory frameworks, its subject areas, subjects and politics. Cases, treaties, and volumes of academic writing are the legal sources through which most of us working in international law relate to the subject and, at times, we might feel these texts are our major project and output.

Yet international law has a rich existence in the world. International law is often developed, conveyed and authorised through objects or images. From the symbolic (the regalia of the head of state and the symbols of sovereignty), to the mundane (a can of dolphin-safe tuna certified as complying with international trade standards), international legal authority can be found in the objects around us. Similarly, the practice of international law often relies on material objects or images, both as evidence (satellite images, bones of the victims of mass atrocities) and to ground authority (for instance through maps and charts). Simultaneously, international law creates objects – or, more specifically, it appropriates material objects and claims or makes them its own. This final aspect of international law’s relationship with objects hints at how material objects relate to the objects as purposes of international law.

Despite the deep implications and infiltrations of international law in the material world around us, the relationship between international law and physical objects has not preoccupied international lawyers or international law scholars. Here, I will begin to unearth this relationship. I aim to provide a new way of thinking about international law in terms of its material and visual culture, interrogating the relationship between material objects and objects as purposes, and to reveal unexplored fixations with objects and images in the field.

Lauterpacht Centre - Term Lecture Programme and Information »

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.